Invincible began in January of 2003, and it felt not only like a response to the ’90s, but a response to the industry’s own response, as the major publishers attempted to shed their juvenile and convoluted baggage - like DC’s Green Lantern becoming evil and destroying his home city in 1994, or overstuffed X-Men events from the same period whose very names evoked eXcess, like Onslaught or The Phalanx Covenant. Even if you weren’t an avid reader at the time, you know exactly what a ’90s comic looked like. Among the most popular characters at Marvel and DC were hulking eyesores like X-Force and the moody, leather-jacketed teenager Superboy. The “big two” publishers focused not only on bloodshed, but on adolescent angst aimed at the teenage crowd. The aesthetic of the time tended towards the “eXtreme,” led by muscle-bound, creator-owned titles at Image, like Bloodstrike and Youngblood, with Marvel and DC following suit. It sounds incredibly similar to the 2010s, which featured line-wide comic reboots every few years, only in the ’90s the risks often outweighed the rewards major publisher Marvel, for instance, didn’t yet have Disney money behind it, and filed for bankruptcy in 1996. But success brought with it a growing speculation bubble, and a glut of re-numberings, gritty relaunches, headline-grabbing events and alternate covers aimed at collectors. The medium saw a major boom at the start of the decade, with X-Men #1 selling a record 8 million copies, Superman #75 (The Death of Superman) selling 6 million, and X-Force #1 not far behind, with 5 million. This wasn’t the case for the original comic series, which began in 2003.ġ1 Images The Birth of InvincibleTo talk about the Invincible comic is to talk about the dreaded industry period that was the 1990s. Whether by accident or by design, the show fits perfectly into the current superhero landscape and its weighty overtones. Invincible arrives just two years after Avengers: Endgame, which saw half the world reduced to dust, just weeks after WandaVision, a show steeped in grief and anguish, and mere days after Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a Wagnerian saga about parents and children.

But where the show stumbles is in its use of several satirical ideas and concepts from the comic, which it reconstructs into a mostly dour depiction of the superhero. The next two episodes unfold in the massacre’s gloomy aftermath, though Mark doesn’t yet know about his father’s involvement. It’s a grizzly, drawn-out sequence where each member of the team meets a vicious end, and it’s also a definitive statement about the show’s tone moving forward.

Simmons), father to teen protagonist Invincible/Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun), breaks bad and murders the show’s parody Justice League, the Guardians of the Globe. The show’s first episode ends with a major twist borrowed from the comics’ second volume: The Superman-like alien hero Omni Man/Nolan Grayson (J.K.

Invincible animation